The meltdown on Wall Street has generated heated rhetoric on the campaign
trail as the candidates compete to convince Americans that the economy will
be safe in their hands.

Senator John McCain has lambasted “the casino culture” of Wall Street, while Senator Barack Obama has railed against “crony capitalism”. Yet their sentiments and their solutions follow similar lines.

Mr Obama, the Democratic hopeful, has accused the Arizona senator of pursuing the laissez faire approach to regulation that led to the current mess under fellow Republican George W Bush. But that has been a rare departure from broad promises to clean up Wall Street and Washington offered by both politicians.

“We need to change the way Washington and Wall Street does business, and I will,” Mr McCain said yesterday.

“I will bring the change we need to restore confidence in our markets and strength to our economy,” was Mr Obama’s version of the same pledge.

Both candidates insist the government should do more to monitor institutions dealing in complex securities, both say regulators should tighten the rules on the type and volume of funds those institutions hold, and both contend that a patchwork regulatory regime should be simplified.

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Mr Obama has shown more depth on reforming the regulatory regime, but a six-point “plan” released on Tuesday only deals with general principles, rather than specifics, of which agencies will do what, or be scrapped or enlarged.

Mr McCain has proposed a commission along the lines of the Congress-mandated panel that investigated the September 11 terrorist attacks from top to bottom as a starting point for reform.

Once in office, it is not unreasonable to assume that the Democrat’s solutions would be more somewhat more restrictive than the Republican’s, but it is possible neither campaign will issue more detailed proposals between now and polling day on November 4.

We should not be surprised, for there is nothing like a crisis to expose candidates for what they are: occupants of a parallel world filled by words and devoid of action, and playing for very high stakes.

Ben Carliner, research director of the Economic Strategy Institute think tank, said: “What is happening shows how far removed their policies are from real problems the economy is facing. There are much more challenging problems ahead than either campaign is prepared to acknowledge.”

The winner of the election will face an estimated $500bn budget deficit, and may have to tear up much of his manifesto.

“Governing will be very different than campaigning,” said Dan Clifton, head of Strategas Policy Research in Washington.

What the candidates can do between now and polling day is to persuade voters that they will be the better steward of the economy. A crisis of this magnitude calls for strong leadership, and the candidate who can display that quality will potentially strike a winning blow in an even race.

“Half the battle is looking like a leader,” said Mr Clifton. “Most people are not sitting at home looking through your proposals from A to Z but they need to be assured that you will manage the economy well. The questions voters are asking are, 'is my money safe, will I keep my home’?”

The economic woe is a golden opportunity for Mr Obama, who has seen his opponent draw level after picking the compelling figure of Sarah Palin, the Alaska governor, as his vice-presidential nominee. Neil Newhouse, a Republican pollster, said: “It will give an edge to Obama but neither candidate has yet found their voice to the voters on this. The first one who does will have a huge advantage.”

Mr Obama has some ideas that should help him with the Democratic constituency and independent voters: he proposes a $1,000 tax cut for the middle class, removing Mr Bush’s tax cut for the top 1pc of earners and raising corporate taxes. But he has yet to persuade a critical number of voters that he will fight their corner, a knack that both Bill and Hillary Clinton possessed in their campaigning.

Mr McCain is handicapped by being a Republican and by a backlog of embarrassing comments on the economy. On three occasions during the primary campaign he admitted not knowing enough about the subject. Even on Monday, as the nation was struggling to digest the news about Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch, he insisted in a stump speech that the “fundamentals of the economy are strong”.

In his next speech, Mr McCain explained that what he had meant was that American workers, the bedrock of the economy, were strong, and promised that they would never be undermined to such an extent on his watch.

Mr Obama, by contrast, has continued to sound like a Harvard professor explaining the nation’s problems to his students. He could be squandering the huge opportunity the turmoil has provided him, and with it the election itself.